We’ll be attending the first session of the CCMG’s Contact Centre Conference Tour in Johannesburg on the 22nd and 23rd of August. The conference tour will continue in September in Cape Town and in Durban in November.

This year, we’re looking forward to adding a new conference to our calendar, as we head to the Customer Experience Management Africa Summit. This two-day summit is taking place on the 1st and 2nd of August at the Cape Town International Convention Centre.

A while back we published what we thought was a very informative blog post on the 4 types of data analytics. Our friends at KDnuggets - the industry's leading knowledge portal on Data Analytics and Machine Learning - re-posted our piece on their site last week and - lo and behold - it became the most read and most shared post on their site that week - over 2,300 reads and 8,500 shares on social media in less than a week. So, in case you missed it the first time we published it, read our post on the 4 Types of Data Analytics and see what everyone is tweeting about.

Luke Turnbull, Head of Customer and Lead Analytics at Principa, chats to South Africa's biggest Sunday news publication, the Sunday Times about the role consumer data plays in loyalty and reward programmes. According to Luke, harnessing customer data has become central to the success of loyalty and rewards programmes as customer data tells us who our customers are, how they behave, what motivates them, their needs and attitudes.

Principa CEO Jaco Rossouw, speaks to ITWeb's Brainstorm Magazine, a publication aimed at the decision makers of the world, about the impact artificial intelligence will have on life as we know it, asking the pertinent question of whether machines can be taught how to reason.